PHP Fog Introduces PHP PaaS

The number of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services is growing. After software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) represents one of the largest growth areas in the cloud. Now, there is a new entrant in the PHP PaaS market -- something we are likely to hear frequently of over the next few years.

PHP Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

At the recent Under the Radar, PHP Fog announced its Cloud PaaS for PHP developers. Under the Radar is a showcase of companies creating “disruptive technology” that counts LinkedIn, AdMob, Flickr and Loopt among its alumni. Dealmaker Media, sponsors of the showcase, reviews over 300 startups, speaks with more than 100 and invites 30 to present on the Under the Radar stage. PHP Fog is one of the 30 companies that presented onstage.

PHP is a web scripting language that grew in popularity quickly and is the foundation of many of the largest and busiest websites on the web, such as Digg, Facebook, Photobucket, Wikipedia and The White House. It is estimated that 35% of the web runs on PHP. Now, PHP Fog, expected to be generally available in the next 30 days, promises to provide a simple, scalable, n-tier PHP PaaS environment.

PHP Fog, like other PaaS platforms, allows developers to focus on creating code and eliminates the need to manage complex configurations and maintenance for deployment environments. Developers can deploy their applications more quickly than managing their own servers. This maximizes the use of their time to focus on delivery of core application functionality.

PHP Fog gives developers dedicated resources for their applications in the cloud and works with existing PHP apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and frameworks such as Zend, Cake and Kohana. PHP Fog also features an app store for launching PHP applications.

According to the company, users can create a new site in seconds and do not even need to know how to code. Deploying changes is as easy as git push. The service also builds in horizontal scalability to ensure applications are consistently scalable -- an often challenging aspect of web application management.

Elsewhere in the Market

PHP Fog joins a market that already includes RightScale’s Zend-based PHP PaaS, Orchestra and cloudControl. Despite the popularity of PHP as a language, PaaS offerings for PHP have lagged behind support for other languages such as Ruby, which VMware’s Cloud Foundry supports. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks, including Grails – but no PHP.

Given the growth that is likely to occur in the PaaS market, PHP Fog will have more company soon.

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